5/10. The score doesn't do justice to the quality of the questing but that is a small part of an MMO. There are too many bugs in general, some mechanics are still horribly untuned, some design concepts are a decade old like some dps classes having reliable cc and others not. There are a lot of things I like about the game and if it was released in 2003 it would have got a very high score but many aspects are badly inferior to other games out at present. It is a dangerous game to risk the goodwill to release the game at this level. If things do not improve dramatically in the next month or two I may suspend the sub until the game is in a better state. I really enjoy the story though and will probably level each of the classes, but that should only take another month or two.

It may not be an issue with his machine, and likely isn't if he meets the specifications. You should expect to play the game with 30fps with minimum graphic settings on a machine that meets the minimum specs and 60+ fps with a machine that meets the recommended specs. They did something recently, between the last week of beta and launch and it has impacted specifically windows 7, the graphics functionality and the game. Running the game in XP SP3 compatibility mode within Windows 7 bypasses part of the problem but it is not really a fix, Windows has a very poor XP emulator and it can cause a number of other issues. There is also a significant memory leak, play for a while and machines with less ram plummet as the computer starts to cache to run the game and when you are relying on a disk cache your performance is boned. By running the game in XP compat mode I went from about 30fps to 110fps, around what i was getting in beta running it without XP compat, but I wouldn't want to rely on running it in compat mode as it is causing other issues. The game also needs an option to cap the fps, there is no point drawing 110 frames a second, i can't see the difference and all it does running my gpu at 100% all the time is heat it up unnecessarily and draw more power, think of the environment!

Like the voice actor WoW used for that dragon at the start of Hyjal? I doubt voice actors get paid that much and it is worth the investment.

I agree they trivialised lightsabers in this game. I have kept upgrading the one i got from ancestor for the sorcerer, but it is usually easier getting a new one than upgrading an old one.

Race is kinda pointless because it has no impact other than the face, if you wear a helm then you can't really tell what race you are most of the time. All a new race will do is have to get new voice actors who have to repeat a lot of vocals. If race had more impact in the game then it would be worthwhile.

I think they are banking on people playing a number of classes, it will give them enough time to bring out more content. It was the same with wow really, while it was slower to level due to needing to grind, there wasn't a whole lot to do other than play different classes. At least in this game the classes have a different story, however, I wish we could dodge the side quests more as they get a bit repetitive.

I am at social 6 now so I am not afraid of doing stuff with others, have done most of the heroics to about level 40s and a lot of the flashpoints. However, stopped doing Heroic4s around Hoth+, the time investment for the reward is just not worth it. Too many packs, too many elites in each pack, you need 3-4 long-duration CCs and a number of dps classes do not have long-duration CCs unless you are fighting robots. They are just not fun so we decided to stop doing them. Most flashpoints packs are easier than heroic4 packs. The lower level heroics weren't so bad but since classes have progressively become weaker vs mobs they have progressively become harder and you are more and more dependant on CC and a lot of our friends who play dps classes with no cc makes these are no go sadly.

I really enjoy the story questing model, even though it still requires the age old kill X mob Y times or loot/activate an object it is not just a slab of text you don't really want to read. However, the non-class quests lack versatility. There should have been multiple outcomes from non-class quests because people will likely be doing them multiple times and might want to take different paths. While there is some minor impact with your choices, there is no significant variance. I would have liked to see fewer quests you needed to do but have more depth to them and have more variety in terms of which quests you get based on what conversation options you take. It should be a flowchart type thing and each chain of responses will lead to a different quest, you would need to repeat them many times to get the same quests. I keep insulting npcs and tell them to sod off and their menial tasks are below me but it doesn't really have a lot of impact, they just keep going. The results from the quests need to have more emphasis, ie the Inquistors made a cult in Nar Shaddaa. Once you leave other than a few mails that is pretty much it. There should have been greater playability in terms of having a more active role in terms of things you become part of during the story and there should be greater repercussion for selecting some paths. While SWTOR is a great improvement on previous MMOs I think it could have done a lot more with the same resources. Most people I know feel overwhelmed with the number of quests in each planet, other than Quesh. They could have reduced the number of quests and made the steps in the ones you had a bit more involved and overall reduced the planet fatigue and improved the depth of the story and the replay value. For Inquisitors for example, I would have liked to see an option for dark side to give Ashara the boot for Thana from Taris. Ashara is a totally inappropriate dark side 'apprentice', which according to the story that is what she has become. I'd rather stick her in my space ship's missile tube and shoot her out at some Republic fighter. A more in-depth story/interaction with quests could have resolved that.

Game is still in beta.

It is not you, they did something they are unaware of in the last build before launch and it severely impacted FPS, I was getting around 110 FPS during beta and they changed the graphic option interface a week out from launch and now I am lucky to crack 60fps unless i am starring at a brick wall. A lot of people have got FPS dropping like a lead balloon and it doesn't matter what you fiddle with your settings, there is nothing that happened in a week that would account for the magnitude of performance drop by so many people. They are trying to figure out who broke what and how to fix it but there is no eta as they don't know what exactly they broke.

People are taking the OP's post out of context, he is not comparing SWTOR to EVE, he said when they get around to adding real space combat he hopes it will be as good as EVE's space combat. EVE space combat is not all that complex in terms of actual combat, most of the technical knowledge was in how was the best way to fit your ship. I hope they avoid a flight sim model, the way SWG went. I think those that actually like full blown flight sims are in the vast minority and there would be more people playing the arcade style sim we currently have than would play a full blown flight sim. The attraction of EVE combat is variety and customisation. In terms of PvE you had a variety of different weapon systems and in terms of tanking you had the option of relying on shields or nano armour reconstructors. The EVE style of sim is not really dependant on the capability of your computer or the quality of your connection, in flight sims as with FPS games, your rig and the quality of your connection to the server had a significant impact on the end result and gives a more level playing field as the ship would move or turn or fire based on how the ship was fitted, not how good your rig is. I would just hope that SWTOR would restrict any form of space combat to non-capital ships for players and for the game to be a lot less disposable than it is in EVE.

I remember in high school, a long time ago, I had to write a sorting routine for a project which took a database of fields, sorted them and displayed the information. Databases where pretty simplistic back then. Now, if a snotty nosed kid could do that over a weekend at high school I wonder why a small army of qualified programmers who have had years to work on this game can't get the auction gizmo to sort by field properly. It is the kind of sloppy thing which should be trivial to fix and functioning the way it does paints a negative image of the product. The developers should also have an intimate knowledge of what their opposition products provide and be well aware where their own product lies, there are some very old mmos that have far superior auction interface functionality. For a new mmo that has the benefit to look at the existing products and take the best of each one to make a superior product there is no excuse to offer something significantly inferior and to not function properly even in it's limited mode.

I am not sure LFG is the answer, it put me off doing any kind of random pickup group activities in other mmos because the people who are lazy, lack social skills and don't want to put any effort into the game are usually the worst kind of people to do group activities with. There should be some better tools to help people find the right guilds, perhaps a guild alliance system which allows some smaller guilds to pool their resources/manpower. The problem with LFG has always been anonymity, it brings the worst out of people and it damages the social environment and turns people that could be decent people into morons because they are over exposed. Question is why do people join guilds who do not provide the structure for you to get what you need? If all the deadbeat guilds would disband and have fewer, better run larger guilds it would accommodate more people and give them what they want/need.

You make that sound like a bad thing.

I dunno, you should see all the hideous Empire chicks guys are flirting with. The force must give you some serious beer goggles.

In fact, Bioware should not close tickets, it should be the customer that closes it once they have received a satisfactory resolution to their problem and every ticket should have both a feedback option to both rate the level of satisfaction and to comment on problems you have had with support. Currently, the only option to let Bioware know that their customer service is sadly lacking is via forum posts and you don't want your dirty laundry aired in public when these can be resolved internally. I and I believe a lot of people rate customer service very highly when it comes to MMOs because it is guarantee that you will run into issues playing an MMO, they are constantly evolving and they are very complex code-wise and over a span of years you will be calling on customer service. It just seems to me that Bioware is inundated with problems and is just sweeping things under the rug by not addressing problems. It is not an acceptable way to treat customers. I don't know if it is a Bioware directive to their customer support team or if it is Bioware not aware of how poorly the customers see the level of customer support. But, there is no mechanism in-game for the customer to relay that information to Bioware.

Add in search and we can make the effort. Otherwise this is very important feedback to our service provider that what they are offering up isn't good enough and if they want our continued business they need to ship up pretty quickly because this level of support isn't going to cut it.

When I submit a ticket and say that something is wrong with my character and not working properly, I don't expect to receive an automated thanks for letting us know and closing the ticket. We dealt with issues like this on EQ 10 years ago, I know because I was a guide back then and worked with server GMs and most things wrong with characters was a simple matter of fixing flags. Not having my level 50 class complete recognised limits the number of daily quests I can do which is one of the main mechanisms for gearing up to operations. Customer service ticket submissions is not a feedback option, it is a customer requesting help. The game is no longer in beta, you can't just ignore interacting with your customers if your product is not functioning properly.

I am a level 50 Powertech Bounty Hunter and it does get a lot harder after about level 30, you progressively become weaker vs mobs as you level. CC is king, if you are a class that doesn't have a long duration CC then your life is going to stink up. It is not that you can't grind your way through, you can. It is just a lot harder and you wont experience a chunk of the content without a group. I can solo elites and even some commanders that do not inflict any internal/elemental damage at level 50 but I was unable to do my level 50 class quest which required me to pass two strong guards simply because they inflicted damage that was hard to mitigate and both cast a very potent heal every 10 seconds or so. I have done almost every Heroic 2, Heroic 2+ and Heroic 4 and am at Social 5 which should highlight how much I have grouped with others. CC is king. There is only so much you can realistically tank and so much you can realistically heal. In a Heroic 2 you need 1 long duration CC, 2+ you need at least one, sometimes 2. In Heroic 4 you need 3 to 4 as you can get up to 5 elites in a pack. Can do the Heroic 4s reliably with 3 people and have done the others with 2 people, if I was a Merc I could probably solo some of them because they get some decent CC and can do some top up healing. Some DPS ACs and every tank AC is just ill equipped for the style of play in terms of not adding decent CC and the mobs reinforcing to add more elites instead of strongs. They should give every class a one minute CC, we always use the minimum amount of CC needed to speed things up, i usually tank 2 to 3 elites depending on what type they are, if they do internal/elemental then I can realistically only tank one of those plus some trash. There are just some horrible combinations. If you take in a Marauder and Jugg dps into a Heroic 4 then you are boned because you have got 1 cc out of the 4 people and are looking at packs of 4 to 5 elites. I don't have an issue with difficulty, but I think it should be more optional than it is. There is no problem making regular mobs weaker and having the option to select harder difficulty levels for the instanced parts. Some people are just more interest in the story and a casual enjoyment of the game than to work hard on every encounter.

I agree, the thing that I like about EVE combat is that it is not reflex oriented. I do not have the extreme hate others do for TOR's space combat, i find the lower level missions to be a relaxing pass-time but the later level ones rely too much on reflex which makes it more unfriendly for my older reflexes. I find the higher level TOR missions being the 40+ ones too difficult for me, perhaps if I pimp out my ship with the best mods and time perfectly the specials then I could probably scrape through but I don't want to break into a sweat, suffer from carpel tunnel syndrome or develop repetitive strain injury on my mouse hand for a game. This game and the whole theme was made for a more strategic space simulator, I just want to remind Bioware that the average gamer is well over 30 years old nowadays and it is getting older, keep that in mind when you make twitchy elements in the game. My reflexes aren't what they used to be.

The benefit of creating sandbox tools is that players can create their own content rather than be totally reliant on the developer to keep throwing new things at them regularly. It is why EVE has done well as a sandbox mmo despite their being dubious content additions over the last few years. The problem is these sandbox mmos have a much more severe player turn-over than your cookie cutter mmo, a lot of people try a game like EVE get butchered in the first week and are gone. While the dream for a great sandbox mmo is there for a lot of people, the power is almost always abused in sandbox mmos and the environment typically becomes more hostile to new players which hurts the developer's ability to retain them as customers. The average lifespan of a player in an MMO is 2 years, I would imagine in a sandbox environment that figure would be significantly lower. I didn't appreciate SWG much when it was released, largely because very few things worked properly, but I think a lot of people appreciate what they tried to do now a lot more than they did at the time. SWG was a mmo well before it's time and they didn't have the resources to pull it off and the technology of the era was more limited. SWTOR really takes the exploration out of the picture, while the areas you quest in are quite vast, they are all quite compact and there is a lot of stuff crammed into the one area, for a game galaxy wide it does feel very cramped. If you merged the best elements of SWTOR with the best concepts of SWG you would come out with a pretty good MMO but that isn't going to happen, EA/Bioware is following the WoW model and unless it is a cosmic failure I don't see them changing from that path.

By levelling pvp you mean ganking lower level players? Tatooine is a hole that nobody wants to hang around any longer than they absolutely have to and I can't imagine it being any different on a PvP server. A few levels difference makes a significant difference in this game, I would massacre someone in the mid 40s and you would lay waste to an army of lower level players. The game just wasn't built or designed for world pvp, it is probably for the best that it is fairly restrictive until people reach the higher levels.

I dislike the companion gating, you get no conversation options for what seems an eternity then you get dumped on with a ton of conversation options once you pass a gate. The whole thing is underwhelming, went from Mako not having any interest in me to married in 5 minutes and that was the end of the conversation options and there is no feeling of attachment after that at all. I have 10k affection with Mako and there is really no difference between 10k and zero other than her being quicker with crew missions. I ditched her for Blizz, unless I absolutely need heals, now that she has proved handier for doing crew missions.

I am a little disappointed with the companions in terms of developing a relationship with them, it feels far inferior to the Dragon Age system and that was just a stand alone game with a very finite amount of game play involved in that game. In terms of Mako you went from nowhere to married in 5 minutes and that was it and she has no conversation options left, it is like a Britney Spears marriage. Not talking relationship alone, the companions seem to be very lite in terms of their involvement, they either like or dislike the choices you make, give you a handful of conversation options at various affection levels and you get a couple of quests. It seems very bland, feels inferior to the DA system and it should have been far more advanced for an MMO version which will have a massively different game time played. I believe the companions should have been one of the major sources of quests and story advances, not just the one you are boning. I also found it very difficult to raise the affection with multiple companions outside of just dumping gifts on them which to me seems a pointless expense/time investment given the lack of their involvement other than them doing crew stuff for me. As a Powertech I found I was forced to stick with Mako irrespective how much I liked or disliked her or how much I would have preferred to be with Blizz just because I needed a healer. I think companions should also have had a class customisation slot which you got to pick/purchase one and it would give them the abilities of a healer, ranged dps, melee dps, melee tank, ranged tank based on what you chose. It would then allow you to pick the companion you liked the most rather than one you were forced to take due to what you needed for gameplay.

You can stick a bag over your head until it is fixed, it remembers the hide/unhide head slot item.